What causes Unity shipping the same asset twice across asset bundles?

A texture or material that two bundles depend on is not assigned to its own bundle, so the build copies the full asset into every bundle that references it.

How do I catch this when it only happens for some players?

Capture it automatically from the player's device with the full stack trace, the device and OS, the build, and a breadcrumb trail of what they did. That turns a vague complaint into a specific, reproducible issue you can fix without owning the hardware it happens on.

How to Fix Unity Shipping the Same Asset Twice Across Asset Bundles

Quick answer: Assign shared dependencies (textures, materials, meshes) to their own dedicated bundle so dependent bundles reference the shared one instead of each embedding a private copy.

Asset bundles pull in their dependencies. If a shared asset has no bundle of its own, every bundle that uses it gets a private duplicate, multiplying its size on disk. Putting shared assets in a common bundle makes the others reference it once.

How to fix it

1. Find the duplicated dependencies

Use the Addressables Analyze tool or a bundle inspector to find assets included in more than one bundle. Shared materials and textures are the usual culprits.

2. Create a shared bundle

Assign the common assets to a dedicated bundle (or an Addressables group marked for shared content). Other bundles will then list it as a dependency instead of copying it.

3. Rebuild and compare sizes

Rebuild the bundles and confirm the total dropped and the shared asset now appears in only one bundle, with the others depending on it.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every Unity error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.

Most of the time the fix is small. Seeing the failure clearly is the part that actually costs you.